Samurai Warriors 3Review

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Yet another mindless entry for the franchise...

By Anthony Gallegos

I feel bad for suckering my co-worker into playing Samurai Warriors 3 with me. Until now he'd been spared the drudgery of the various Warriors games, and I was hoping he might enjoy this one for the same reason I'd enjoyed them when they first started coming out in the North America: simple, mindless combat. The problem is that almost nothing has changed about these games over the years. Samurai Warriors 3 is immediately familiar to anyone who's played the previous games and disappointingly dated to newcomers who've never picked up a controller and slogged through this type of boring hack-n-slash "action" game.

Exit Theatre Mode

Samurai Warriors 3 puts you in control of one of many fantastically re-imagined historical characters from Japan's Warring States (Sengoku) period. Once you select which hero you want to play as, you then work through a number of game modes that either tell part of the story for Japanese unification, tell an idiotic story about demons (Murasame Castle mode), or simply put the player in a level of their choice that they can play for "fun." The modes are different in that they either tell no story or tell vague, poorly written ones with different subject matter, but all the modes boil down to the same core experience.

Every level and mode in Samurai Warriors 3 has pretty much the exact same gameplay the series has been rehashing for years now. Using your ultra-powerful character, you drop into a level full of enemies with almost non-existent A.I., killing hordes of people in an effort to ultimately kill a few hero units. Along the way your characters will level up and you'll unlock various weaponry and armor, but through it all you'll be mashing the same few attack buttons to repeat the same combos over and over, beating your way through enemies with relative impunity. In the last generation of consoles this terrible A.I. was briefly acceptable because it was a spectacle to see so many enemies on screen, but now it's just lazy, uninspired, and not worth the time it takes to play through any of the stages.

Even if you do somehow kid yourself into still thinking you like these games, you'll be disappointed by what you see. Samurai Warriors 3 puts relatively few enemies on screen at any given time. It is downright ugly looking too, with muddy textures and a pretty extreme rate of pop-in that makes it look like enemies are appearing out of thin air. Granted, the overall performance is pretty good and the game experiences very little slow down (even when playing split-screen), but the cost you pay is for an already boring game to have even fewer enemies on screen than what's expected.

Dont' be fooled, this isn't as cool as it looks.

If the game was any fun, you'd find a lot of reasons to keep on playing. A large number of characters are unlockable, and you can play through the entire game locally with a friend, or in Murasame Castle mode online (though you can only play missions with someone if you both have progressed up to the point of the selected stage, and you have to re-invite them after each level). So, yeah, there's plenty of game here if you want it. The problem is that you can experience the entirety of what the game has to offer after playing any stage with any character – it's all the same crap repeated ad nauseum.

The Verdict

It&#Array;s telling to me that the biggest question that arises when anyone walks by my desk is, &#Array;Why are they still making these?&#Array; Everyone seems to be in consensus that these games have been chock full of the same boring gameplay for years now, so the only reason I can imagine they&#Array;re still making them is the cold hard cash some group of die-hard fans keeps putting in their hands. Somewhere out there, some of you are giving them money to sell you the same game over and over again. If repetition and mindlessness is what you&#Array;re looking for in your life, go do some pushups or eat cupcakes till you&#Array;re sick &#Array; either would be more satisfying than purchasing and playing Samurai Warriors 3.